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ADOM's ridiculous baroque design is both its strength and its downfall. A lot of the weird poo poo is really memorable and cool in ways that "better," well-designed roguelikes don't measure up to, but it's also really hard to recommend that anyone actually suffer through playing it for a lot of those exact same reasons.
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Feb 10, 2021 22:51
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Neon Chrome was boring as sin to play after the first ten minutes and I'm also pretty sure I cleared it with my first character, which is the real dividing line that makes something Not A Roguelike.
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Feb 12, 2021 19:08
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Re: ADOM, I think there's a strong argument, or at least a design tension, where you want the immediate early game of a roguelike to be simple and more focused compared to the primary game loop, because that feeling of early-game freedom and possibility is what incentivizes acutally come back after ending a run. Games where the early levels feel notably punishing or tedious are the ones I'm quickest to drop.
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Feb 27, 2021 21:49
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I burned out and dropped DD long before they added radiant mode, so I'm not sure how much that fixed things, but the aspect that I found most galling and demotivating about the grindiness is how unnecessary and obviously padded-out it was. Like, okay there's eight bosses across four zones, and the first chunk of the game is about building a roster and clearing those. Then it's done after a bunch of hours and the next phase of the game is... clearing out the exact same set of 8 bosses again, with higher stats and no new mechanics? And then I guess after that there's a semi-optional opportunity to do the exact same set of bosses a third time. How about, if you ran out of content to add, just let me go ahead and beat the game instead of running laps? That, compounded with the systems where you have to grind for money and experience to replace losses any time you gently caress up, really made me feel like the game wasn't respecting my time. King of Bleh fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Mar 10, 2021 |
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Mar 10, 2021 21:36
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Dominions main faults are that it's insanely unfriendly to learn, the extreme ends of optimal play are mainly characterized by extra tedium and book-keeping, the UI is hideous, its design is fully mired in questionable decisions made decades ago, and you can spend hours getting invested in a specific game and then end up turbo-murdered out of the blue due to a fatal oversight. Which really makes it a perfect fit for anyone who enjoys roguelikes.
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May 12, 2021 04:31
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I think something like star realms or dominion is actually super ideal for learning deckbuilding basics because a problem with the learning curve of games like slay the spire is that the feedback loops of reward and punishment are so delayed and slow. You can very conceivably make terrible choices right out of the gate in act1 of StS and still slog through a bunch of fights before dying of attrition 30+ minutes later, and when that happens it won't be obvious at all which choices were wrong. Comparitively, you can knock out matches of dominion or whatever in like 5 minutes a pop, and that faster iteration helps to internalize the absolute fundamentals like "card removal is strong," "adding new cards doesn't always improve your deck," etc.
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Oct 9, 2022 23:22
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Rogue Legacy style "stats permanently go up" style progression is dumb, but it's also actually pretty rare. I also feel like there's a direct line of inspiration from that to StS-style ascension systems where it's reversed and you continuously make the game harder instead of easier, and the latter is good imo.
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Jun 21, 2023 07:27
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Glazius posted:The only quibble I had with it was that I pushed myself to advance the plot and was locked into harder dungeons without a lot of mentor metaprogression, but they fixed that with a patch that let you go back to the easier ones. Yeah the step up to hard mode is a pretty big difficulty spike and I think I liked it better as a more casual Vibes game; I don't know that the combat and mechanics are actually engaging enough for me to want to do the necessary Getting Good that the second act asks of you. Absolutely nothing but praise for the writing and premise, though.
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Dec 20, 2023 23:01
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I, too, grew tired of being perplexed by all the completely opaque discourse and bewildering screenshots of Achra and bought it. Game good; really scratches the same Rift Wizard "pore over skill trees for 10 minutes and ponder" itch.
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Jan 26, 2024 19:35
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My current problem in Achra is I keep throwing away winnable runs by looking at the forbidden zones, saying "those enemies would almost certainly instantly kill me on turn 2," and then going in anyway.
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Jan 27, 2024 08:11
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cock hero flux posted:projection attack trigger moved to on prayer, the graveyard for effects that might as well no longer exist. RIP Oh, it's obviously way less strong since I don't think there's any source of multi-prayers, but I like this a lot better. Most of the triggers in the game already push you towards generating lots of attacks and hits, so I think boosting prayer instead makes sense in terms of encouraging diversity.
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Jan 31, 2024 22:33
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Pigbuster posted:good lord we've now had 5 daily content additions for Path of Achra in a row, this dev is wild I both love and hate it. I'm trying to win with a particular prestige (snakedancer) and I feel like I need to blank-slate rework my approach each time I start up the game because specifically the poison and life trees keep changing so often this month.
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Feb 28, 2024 22:45
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The one that always unreasonably irritates me is StS clones that also copy the "arrow pointing between selected card and selected enemy" UI element. It's so incredibly specific! Everyone knows what you did!
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Feb 29, 2024 19:21
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Cogmind is a brilliant, masterfully crafted game that feels completely tedious and demotivating to actually play, even as the sort of masochist who normally enjoys the trad RL genre.
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Mar 1, 2024 01:38
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The oldschool games with "spoilers" like Nethack etc are really just metaprogression in another form, and are arguably worse in that regard than the +1-to-starting-HP format because they give players the false impression that memorizing a bunch of obtuse secrets and gotchas has anything to do with skill or mastery.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:39
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unattended spaghetti posted:Nethack knew what was up. It had the oracle. Before the internet I’m sure that helped a ton of people. It’s pretty obsolete now, but as an ingame way to find out interactions and tricks it was pretty cool. The oracle is a perfect illustration of my point, because gold for hints is literally this: victrix posted:Now, games that have +0.5% to physical damage per point as their upgrade tree can gently caress off, similarly games that make you choose between meta currency and in-run currency, also awful. "hints" are ultimately a meta-game benefit that you choose at the opportunity cost of having a weaker run.
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Mar 2, 2024 00:10
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the holy poopacy posted:Is anyone actually saying that acquiring mastery is a form of metaprogression? No one is saying this, although there's some contention over whether "knowing trivia" counts as mastery or skill. The Cat Lord in ADOM is another great example of this.
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Mar 2, 2024 02:59
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Code chant: on prayer or game turn, lose 4 hours of sleep and release another update to Path of Achra.
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Mar 2, 2024 04:06
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:- direct identification is available, but is tedious to use. Angband had a big issue with this for the first ~20 years of its history, in that the Identify spell had a high cost and failure rate, but you could safely just try to cast it over and over again and rest up when out of MP (and Angband has no "clock" mechanisms to speak of, to encourage you to not waste time). "Balance by tedium" like this is a problem with a lot of the older games and slightly endemic to the genre as it was initially conceived. If permadeath means your stakes on failure are to lose 10 hours of a run, it suddenly becomes "rational" to spend a single hour doing something extremely safe and tedious like grinding or farming in order to hedge against that outcome, if the game permits it.
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Mar 5, 2024 20:29
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DrManiac posted:I know I'm late to the party, but any path of Achra tips? I can consistently get to mid game until I hit a boss and get smoked. Pick a specific action/trigger you want to focus on, and primarily take powers/items that also boost or benefit from this trigger. There are ways to "double dip" but generally you will only be doing one category of thing each player turn. You need some answer for how your character is going to survive -- this usually means you need some large scaling source of a defensive stat (armor/dodge/etc), and also a source of healing, and one or more prayers that you always keep at full charges for divine intervention. Try and pick "good enough" equipment for each slot in the first couple stages and then sacrifice everything else you pick up to boost those picks. The sacrifice bonuses are very noticeable early game, but get less so later on when you might decide to switch gear for better stuff. Avoid the "forbidden" zones entirely until you've cleared the first couple cycles and have a better intuition on how those specific enemies work and which ones you can and can't take on safely with a given character. Towers are okay and should be safe unless your character is extremely behind on the power curve.
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Mar 9, 2024 04:35
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Tea Party Crasher posted:Yeah if we still called first person shooters Doom clones we'd be having God awful conversations about whether or not having actual three-dimensional rooms above rooms disqualifies your game from being a part of the genre This is a key facet of why the BI is silly cargo cult nonsense -- genres are allowed to evolve and grow past their origins, obviously; probing at the boundaries of genre and seeing what happens is part of a healthy artistic scene and is part of why genre exists as a meaningful concept. Newer inventions like metaprogression, ascension/heat systems, etc are a legitimate part of the roguelike genre with equal authenticity to older considerations such as the non-modality clause; they're just different branches on the evolutionary tree, and that's completely okay. It's also totally okay to prefer certain "flavors" of RL over others. There are probably plenty of genres that you take for granted that already have this degree of speciation inside of them -- do you like high fantasy or gritty low fantasy? Hard sci-fi or space operas? Do you like slapstick comedy or satire? What sort of music do you listen to, and how many different niche subgenres exist inside of it? And so on, ad infinitum. No one tries arguing that Halo isn't an FPS because you have regenerating health instead of medpacks, or because there aren't colored keycards, or you can only carry two weapons, or that there's vehicles. Even though all of these are very different design decisions from older games! King of Bleh fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 01:58
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cock hero flux posted:I will argue that metaprogression, as commonly implemented, is absolutely not a legitimate part of the genre or a natural evolution of it. It is directly contrary to the design philosophy that established the genre. This is not the same as declaring that Halo isn't an FPS because there's vehicles; this is like declaring that Grand Theft Auto isn't a racing game because the point of the game isn't racing. This begs the question by assuming that all true roguelike games have a specific immutable "point," rather than being a collection of works with mechanical and thematic similarities. "A fixed-difficulty game where each run you either beat it or you don't" is one key facet of the genre, but it's not the "point" of the genre and has no more or less authority granted to it from some hypothetical Game Design Genre-Ruling Deity. It ultimately feels like a retread of the earlier shmup argument where the "point" of a true shmup is to memorize fixed levels... e: I also think it's okay to acknowledge that sometimes fads in design lead to things that are bad and dumb and not fun, without discrediting a game's identity. Platformers went through a whole Thing in the early-3D era where every game inevitably revolved around hoovering up hundreds of collectible doodads in various categories to unlock progress, instead of progressing linearly through levels and completing them by reaching the end. I personally found this asinine and had nothing to do with what I perceived at the time to be the "point" of the Mario-likes I grew up with, but I also don't think it discredits those games' identity in any way. King of Bleh fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Mar 13, 2024 |
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Mar 13, 2024 02:11
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It's only a "reversal" if you view difficulty as a non-reducible element of the genre, rather than a incidental footnote. A game can be easy, or can start hard and get easy, or can start easy and get hard, and still have the essential qualities of a roguelike. You still start over on failure, and you still experience new random elements upon restart, so why not? It's literally just difficulty, it's a glorified slider in a menu.
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Mar 13, 2024 02:40
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It's kind of sad because you can tell that the devs of desktop dungeons have a lot of passion for it, but I also feel like the ugly original free alpha/demo version was the best iteration of the game and everything since then has just diluted the purity of the premise.
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Mar 13, 2024 23:16
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Tea Party Crasher posted:I think it would be easier for people to find what they want If you were to snip the thin membrane between them and just let them be their own distinct genres. Like why can't deck builders just be deck builders? Slay the Spire et al are clearly Roguelikes because they're at base a deckbuilder--like Dominion, or Star Realms--but they also have metaprogression (your deck and resources do not reset between matches, as in a true deckbuilder).
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Mar 14, 2024 21:12
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RW2 should add a food clock mechanic 
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Mar 27, 2024 17:57
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Thank god he’s going to highlight winning start options, I resorted to a spreadsheet by cycle 10 or so.
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Apr 3, 2024 03:11
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Wafflecopper posted:Yeah that’ll happen sometimes, especially before you learn the enemies and what they do. Unlike TOME with its randomised gently caress you supervillains out of nowhere, you can see what enemies are in each level and what their abilities are before you choose which way to go. This is way more important than anything you can do tactically. Also, be aware of your resists, one of the cultures (or maybe a class) starts with like -75% lightning resist so if that’s you you absolutely want to avoid all levels with lightning enemies Achra also has an oddly funny difficulty/skill sine wave curve thing going on where at low cycles there's a particular set of nasty tricks and specific enemies that you simply memorize how to overcome, and churn through a bunch of cycles somewhat on auto-pilot. Then you wake up at some point and realize that enemies in the first zone or two have begun generating out of the gate with +500% bonuses to Hit or Speed or whatever and you have to start paying attention again or you can lose a character before even reaching a tower.
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Apr 5, 2024 01:26
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Tea Party Crasher posted:All this talk of ToME is making me want to try it out for the first time. Out of the classics I was always a dungeon crawlstone soup and net hack person, but I bought ToME recently because I heard it has a smart auto explore feature which makes it accessible and low friction for my voice control setup. Any tips for a newbie anybody wants to throw at me while I map all of my voice attack commands? ToME is much more slowly paced than Nethack or Crawl -- it's more like Qud or ADOM in that regard. If the thought of putting LONG stretches of time into a character and then getting annihilated in a single bad fight bothers you at all, there's a quasi-roguelike game mode where you get a limited number of extra lives that can be nice while you're learning the game. In particular there's several "gotcha" encounters and dungeons where it's almost certain that you'll die the first time or two you encounter them. Also there's an extremely important unlock / milestone underneath a lake that's inside a forest. However there's also a comparatively nasty boss fight directly in front of it, so there's some risk/reward involved in when you try to take it on.
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Apr 16, 2024 17:51
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credburn posted:Why do I hate ToME so much? I love ToME, but the visual aesthetics of it are deeply ugly, the writing ranges from "mediocre" to "terrible," and the itemization is so obtuse and unnecessarily complex that it verges on being actively hostile to engage with.
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Apr 16, 2024 20:15
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I don't think the absurdity really comes through properly for anyone who hasn't played Achra, but the screen showing "hit this button for controls, hit this button for a guide" is a single user-interaction away from almost every game surface in Achra. Main menu? -> Click the mobile-esque hamburger icon in the corner, it's one of the only things that is clickable. You've left the main menu to create a new character? That's okay, the hamburger is still there! Created a character and are now playing the game? That's okay, the menu is still right there, waiting for you. Perhaps you haven't used a phone before and don't recognize the traditional icon for "this is a menu"? That's okay, the escape button also works in exactly the way one would expect! In all of these cases, "controls" and "guide" are not hidden, they are the top two items on the subsequent screen, directly in the center. The complaint is obtuse to a level where I have to suppose the poster was either trolling or.... King of Bleh fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 07:06
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deep dish peat moss posted:What's a good build to carry me through early cycles in Achra? I'm on Cycle 3 right now and struggling but I think I'd enjoy the game more and have an easier time with it on the higher cycles where you can put a build together faster Eris peltast, with the "super-peltast" prestige that only requires levels in Aim. Jack Trades posted:Path of Achra is truly the most masochistic video game experience ever devised.
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Apr 26, 2024 19:46
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Kanos posted:I feel like I'm missing something regarding Achra builds. I've won numerous times with various cowardly summoner builds that hide in a corner sobbing while my infinite tides of disposable minions kill everything for me, but whenever I try a more hands-on martial build it seems basically impossible to get off the ground due to either lacking durability or lacking sustainability. It seems like you have to spend a huge skill tax just to get over stuff like inflexibility tanking your speed to uselessness or simply just getting enough armor or block or dodge to not die, which in turn delays your offense skills, which means you're eating more hits to begin with. Well, "melee build" and "slow, tanky melee build" are two slightly different things; as others noted there are plenty of speedy glass cannon melee options that win by blitzing everything down rapidly while only having moderate defenses. The key point with inflexibility (and any speed-reducing mechanic) is that it still can only reduce you to your minimum, which you can eventually raise into the 30s or 40s which is "good enough." You can also always pick a god that specifically fills the survivability gaps you need to skirt the "skill tax" issue. Mardok and Humbaba both give healing and "smash stuff" synergy straight out of the gate.
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May 1, 2024 22:45
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FutureCop posted:Was curious...how far do you guys typically get in your roguelikes? cock hero flux posted:i either bounce off immediately or obsessively no-life my way through about 90% of everything there is to do over the course of about a month This is sort of me too. If a game hooks me, I will stake out a vendetta on clearing it at least once. I compulsively splatted probably a few dozen Rift Wizard runs for a week or two without really doing anything else until I managed to win for the first time. Although, if a game is only mid I'm willing to dip once I've secured at least the one clear. Golden Krone Hotel is an example of a RL I thought was totally "fine" and have poked at a couple more times but feel no compulsion to clear more than once. This is actually why I really love the heat/ascension system of design, as it means that generally the game is easy enough out of the gate to win one run, and then you can make the judgement call on whether the game is good enough to bother mastering further without feeling like you're missing out on anything if you decide not to.
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May 2, 2024 19:49
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This topic is reminding me that I stopped playing Qud like a year ago and will still have to? (get to!) beat it for the first time when it officially hits 1.0
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May 2, 2024 23:38
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Azhdaha has been perplexing me in Achra for a while. I'd read the description, frown and think for a while, then just pick someone else. The only god themed around a transformation, except the transformation... isn't really very good? And how are you supposed to get any stacks of it, when two of them are "on entrance" with a cap of exactly one point? Then I finally had my eureka moment -- the chant-based prestige refills prayer #1 on adjacent death.  Turned out to be a very silly build. Just stand next to each enemy one at a time and pray, then repeat after the flurry of explosions and frenzy attacks subside. Uhrata also looks like it might unlock some goofy combos with other gods too -- unlimited Ashem prayer loops? Exponential ant explosion with Formus?
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May 3, 2024 09:48
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Crawl on average, the whole game, is a really solid, like 8/10 RL. But! Specifically the "orc jesus" HOPr class that played like a cross between pikmin and a full-blown RPG/tactics game is one of the coolest and most novel gaming experiences I've seen in the genre; that run lives in my head rent free years and years after the fact. I think I only managed like 8ish runes because I lost too many orc bros to attrition, but in my heart it was still my greatest victory.
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May 3, 2024 19:53
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Mehtar is another god that feels a bit half-baked. The existence of the very specific "dreamer" prestige makes it feel like it's really just a single concept that's unnecessarily split in half. The god alone has poor generation of the dream resource, and the prestige alone is kind of just a poor man's Kairos skirt.
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May 4, 2024 06:03
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More thoughts about Achra gods: Angra is another weird one. I can't quite figure out what within the poison/blood line really benefits or synergizes with "all of your allies immediately murder themselves," except I guess maaaaybe Oozemancer? But I already ran an oozemancer, so instead what I latched onto was prayer #3. What's that you say, a single action that applies sickness to every enemy on the map?  This is actually a very annoying build to get running initially since it doesn't make much sense or work at all until you have both the prestige and prayer 3 up, but once you do: lol. Pray to afflict the entire map, then walk around in a circle generating free damage until you've Shazusa'd your way to victory.
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May 5, 2024 00:50
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DACK FAYDEN posted:stupid idiot question: when would I ever want Inflexibility to be above 1? like sure, all the armor with Inflexibility 1+ is at least reasonably tempting, but halving my speed is not something I'm ever interested in unless I'm tanky enough that I should be able to win without the good armor. what am I missing? Aside from the various ways to mitigate the downside, inflexibility actually increases block, so a character who wants to stack block to the moon (Pallas, the "Valr" culture) has upside from taking it.
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May 5, 2024 23:46
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